Destruction in Hammond Lane. Image from Trevor Whitehead and Tom Geraghty’s ‘The Dublin Fire Brigade’ (Dublin City Council, 2004)
Saturday, 27 April 1878, was a devastating day for Dublin, when death and destruction made their presence felt in one of the poorest districts of the city.
One newspaper called the day “a catastrophe, perhaps exceeding in its calamitous nature and deplorable consequences, any event which happened in Ireland within recent years.” The death of fourteen Dubliners in Hammond Lane, the result of an industrial accident, shocked the city and altered the street forever, with tenements, public houses and industrial buildings reduced to rubble or dragged down in the days that followed. Today, there is no memorial at the site of one of the worst industrial accidents in the history of the city.
Hammond Lane,located just off Church Street. This nineteenth century map comes from Swilson.info.
In the late 1870s, Hammond Lane and the streets around it were heavily populated. Situated beside Church Street, and in the vicinity of Smithfield, the narrow street was home to several tenement houses, but also some industrial buildings, with the foundry and ironworks of Messrs. Strong a significant local employer. One contemporary source described the street, and not in a flattering manner:
On one side of it was a public house kept by a name named Patrick Duffy, while on the other side was a private dwelling house inhabited by several families. Tenement houses occupied by people of the labouring classes interspersed with a few shops of extremely humble pretensions formed the rest of the narrow, long, dirty street.
At one o’clock on the day of the tragedy, the bells of the foundry rang, the sign to discontinue work. Men had gone to their dinners, and the lane was described as “deserted, save by a few passers-by and some children playing in front of the ill-fated walls.” Some men made their way into the neighbouring Duffy’s pub to enjoy a pint on their break, but little time passed before tragedy struck:
Scarcely however, had half an hour elapsed, than, while about twenty persons were taking some refreshment in Duffy’s public-house, a dreadful explosion was heard, and the houses in the immediate neighbourhood were shaken as by the shock of an earthquake, while simultaneously, the boiler burst with terrific force, one of the front walls of the foundry was rent into pieces, and literally blown into the street.
One newspaper described how “the public-house and the factory, instantaneously giving away, fell with a loud crash, amid blinding clouds of dust, down into a mass of ruins and debris.”
When the large twenty-foot boiler of Strong’s exploded, a portion of it was thrown across the street, “violently hurled into a gateway opposite. Had it struck one of the houses filled with alarmed men, women and children, a terrible addition might have been made to the dreadful calamity.”
In their history of the Dublin Fire Brigade, Tom Geraghty and Trevor Whitehead described the madness of the scene:
Many people were buried in the debris of their collapsed homes, while others stumbled out with varying degrees of injury, trauma or bewilderment. The scene, which a few seconds before was one of life, activity and neighbourliness, was turned into a virtual battleground, with everywhere the pleading cries of people seeking immediate help for themselves or those they knew who were now buried or lying amidst the carnage.
Quickly arriving at the site, Dublin firefighters got down to the business of trying to save lives, calling for help from the nearby Royal Barracks. One hundred men from the 91st Highlanders arrived, and assisted the firefighters in removing debris. Geraghty and Whitehead have described Duffy’s public house as “a shambles, having collapsed like a pack of cards, burying those inside.” The body of Mr. Duffy, the owner of the pub, was removed the rubble, along with two of his daughters who also perished.
A list of the dead from The Irish Times, two days after the tragedy.
The manner in which bodies and survivors were discovered in the rubble was reported in detail in the press:
…a man named Patrick Dunne was found by the firemen wedged in among some beams of wood in the cellar of the public house. He was alive, but severely cut and otherwise injured. When the greater part of the rubbish had been removed from over his head and shoulders, it was found that two women were lying over him in such a position as to utterly prevent him using his arms and legs.
The tragedy was widely reported beyond Dublin. In Ulster, one regional newspaper reported that “bricks thrown up the explosion” were to be found on the roof of the nearby Four Courts:
Amongst the many extraordinary incidents connected with the explosion is the escape of a country woman who had come to town to do some marketing. She had completed nearly all her business, when she stopped her donkey and cart just opposite the foundry, while she crossed the road to buy some few articles. She had only gone a couple of yards when the explosion occurred, and donkey and cart were buried in the debris. Bricks thrown up by the explosion were on Sunday to be seen on the dome of the Four Courts.
In such a heavily populated area, the tragedy brought great hardship onto people who already had little. Days later, the press were reporting that families were reduced to destitution and seeking outdoor relief. The tragedy could have been much greater of course. Being lunchtime on a Saturday, the foundry was manned by a relatively small staff of a few dozen men. At the height of the working week, more than a hundred would be on the premises.
When the tragedy came before the Coroner’s Court, details of how the fourteen had lost their lives emerged. Twelve had suffocated, while two were killed by crushing, and more than thirty people were injured in the blast, some maimed for life. Geraghty and Whitehead note that:
The engineers report stated that the boiler was not properly maintained and was weakened by corrosion. No independent engineer had examined the boiler in the previous two years…There were no statutory regulations under the Factories Act 1875 for the inspection of boilers, although such provision had been demanded from parliament by engineers throughout the United Kingdom.
In the end, nobody was found negligent. Instead, it was found that “the explosion was the result of a defective condition of one of the boiler plates, which was externally corroded to a dangerous extent…We cannot attribute any criminal negligence to the Messrs Strong, who appear to have taken all reasonable care to keep the boiler in effective condition.”
Hammond Lane today, Google Maps.
These kind of tragedies happened (and happen) in other cities too, where industrial boilers also proved lethal. In New York, fifty-eight people were killed in March 1908 when the boiler of the Grover shoe factory exploded, destroying a four-story building. Mere weeks ago, a boiler explosion in Bangladesh, claiming the lives of many workers.
In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, there was an outpouring of support for the families of the victims. The profits of performances in Dublin theatres were donated to the bereaved and injured, and Dubliners were generous in supporting the relief fund. Still, the tragedy quickly disappeared from the pages of Dublin newspapers, leaving the people of Hammond Lane to put the pieces back together again.
My thanks to Terry Crosbie, who has done much to protect and promote the history of the area in question, for pointing me towards this story.
